Invisible Unmanned Aircraft

MattSparkes writes, "A Minnesota company, VeraTech, has applied for a patent on an unmanned drone that is nearly invisible to the naked eye. The Phantom Sentinel takes advantage of the phenomenon where fast moving objects appear as only a blur, so it fades out of view once it speeds up. This is achieved by rotating the entire craft. The center of gravity is in open air between two of the blade-like wings. There are some videos of a prototype in action on the VeraTech site." The company says you could get usable video of the terrain by processing the images from a spinning camera. One version of the drone is small enough to launch by throwing it like a boomerang. And it folds for travel.

Comments

Videos?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what exactly would we not see there?

No it isn't invisible

[EmbeddedJanitor]

but it is close.... Yet another misleading /. subject header.

The basic idea is that the plane flies by rotating and, just as a fan blade or propeller becomes close to invisible when spinning, this aircraft might too.

Of course visibility to the naked eye is only a very small part of invisibility. This thing probably sticks out like dogs balls on radar.

Re:Invisible

[Daniel_Staal]

This looks designed to be robotic, so don't worry about the pilot.

And, while not completely invisible, it has a much lower visual signature than anything else of comperable size. I'm just not quite sure what the use is: it probably has a higher radar cross-section, so it's fairly useless as a spy-plane. The only thing you are really hiding from are people. Or civilians. Might be usefull as a close-rage spybot on a battlefield, but anybody with smart weapons can see and hit it quickly.

Waste of money...

[ltwally]

Military drones fly at extremely high altitudes. Thus, they don't have to worry about being spotted by the naked eye. They're also very small, so they have a little tiney-tiny radar cross-section, too -- making them look like a bird on most radar screens.

Basically, this sounds overly-complicated and expensive to implement and is utterly unneeded. So... the military may well go for it! But it's still completely retarded.